Pros:

Cons:

If you were a fan of Sega's long-running light gun zombie-blasting franchise The House of the Dead, you were probably excited to hear that a sequel entitled Touch the Dead was coming to the Nintendo DS. If that's the case, we have a couple of disappointments for you. First, it's not a sequel. It's not even part of the same franchise. Touch the Dead was developed by Dream On Studios and published by Eidos. Sega has absolutely nothing to do with it. Second, while its on-rails gameplay is similar to House of the Dead, with stylus-tapping replacing the light gun, Touch the Dead fails to capture the appeal that made Sega's game so oddly compelling.

But let's accentuate the positive first. There are zombies in this game. Lots and lots of zombies. And most people tend to fall into one of two categories when it comes to zombies. They either don't get the appeal and can't stand anything to do with them, or they love them so much that they'll sit through "The Passion of the Christ" just because they heard that the dude comes back to life at the end of it. So if you're a zombie fan, congratulations. You've hit the motherlode of handheld zombie gaming. (Of course, that's ignoring the existence of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, which is much, much better.)

Also, shooting zombies is fun. This is kind of a no-brainer, pardon the pun. The stylus-tapping isn't quite as satisfying as pointing a light gun at the screen and pulling the trigger, but it's pretty damn cool watching your undead foes wither and re-die under a hail of bullets. Nailing a zombie in the head will bring it down more quickly than peppering it with body shots, but once the zombies figure this out and start juking and jiving to avoid your bullets, this is easier said than done.

During the course of the game, you acquire a small arsenal of anti-zombie implements, including a crowbar (utterly useless), a pistol (light damage, infinite ammo), a shotgun (heavy damage, limited ammo) and a machinegun (rapid-fire, limited ammo). Shooting cabinets and crates reveals pick-ups that add to your ammo count, enhance your weapons or restore some of your health. Fortunately, unlike in Resident Evil, you'll usually have plenty of ammo to get the job done, with enough left over to send all of your NRA friends really amazing gift baskets for Christmas.

Unfortunately, as much fun as shooting zombies is, reloading your weapon is exactly as much not-fun. In House of the Dead, you just aimed off screen and pulled the trigger to reload. In Touch the Dead, you need to tap the ammo icon on the lower right corner of the touch screen and drag over to the clip icon on the lower left corner of the touch screen. And as if that wasn't enough, you also have to wait while your character performs an on-screen reload animation, which gets really annoying when you're being mobbed by zombies. Once things really heat up, it feels like you're constantly reloading your weapon, which is crazy. In a game entirely devoted to shooting zombies, you should spend 98 percent of your time doing only that, with the other two percent spent talking about how awesome shooting zombies is.